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CHAPTER2
Cannon
I hunch in my car.I’m two blocks away from my target, but I’m not technically on duty. The Mercedes pulls into the parking lot. The dance studio doesn’t open until one, and it’s now eleven a.m.
“Early like always,” I murmur.
“What?”
I shake myself. I’m on the phone, and I’ve tuned out my friend and sometimes coworker, Elsa. She used to be Jacobi’s maid, but she’s taken to catching cheaters with me in my private investigator business. She also doesn’t mind that I’m not a licensed investigator and all my payments are under the table.
“Nothing. I’m just doing surveillance,” I say.
“Need help?”
“Sorry, it’s just intel for some rich bastard. No cheaters.”
“Damn.” Elsa’s been a struggling actress for too long. She likes being the one in control every once in a while, and catching cheating spouses gives her that high.
I’m the opposite. I’m so fucking sick of how easy it is to catch cheaters. It used to be a challenge until Elsa started working with me. Put her in a short skirt and have her act willing, and we close cases left and right. I’d rather bust deadbeat parents, but that involves more legitimate red tape than what I’m willing to put up with.
It’d point the attention in my direction, and I don’t need that.
“I’m going to take it easy for a while.” She might as well know I’d rather take the strap of my Nikon camera and throttle myself than endure another spouse pissed off at me for being the messenger they hired.
“Take it easy? You’re pretty fucking laid back as it is. Are you quitting?”
I’m not laid back. I’m strung tighter than Elsa’s wallet, but no one needs to know. I hate letting her down. I didn’t grow up with much family, and she’s taken the role of a sister—if siblings busted affairs together on the regular.
The longer I’m around Elsa, the more she reminds me of a friend from my past. Someone I didn’t know I was letting down until she was gone in the most heartbreaking way. I could’ve helped her, and maybe that’s why I started working with Elsa, but I’m her boss. I’m responsible for her. I don’t take lightly the danger she finds herself in. She’s going to get hurt when some dude thinks she’s the reason his marriage broke up.
But she relies on the money from the jobs I get to carry her between gigs. I can’t leave her without income. As much as I’m starting to dread my work, I’ll delay the decision to close my doors a little longer. “No, I’m not quitting.” But I add, “Not yet.”
“Shit, Cannon. You scared me.” She sighs. “I guess I’ll still go to the audition my agent wants me to go to tomorrow.”
“Stripper or drug addict?”
She snorts. “Both, this time. Guess I play each role so convincingly he thinks I’m a shoo-in.”
“Break a leg.”
“You don’t say that until I get the part. Call me if you change your mind.”
She hangs up, and I stare at the small dance studio. A tall, graceful woman with her dark hair bound in a tight bun and talking on the phone—even though she should concentrate on situational awareness—unlocks the doors. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, but spying on the friend of my buddy’s wife isn’t it.
Except I can’t help it.
She’s supposedly in trouble and hasn’t said a damn thing. Why? What’s she hiding? I approached Jacobi a couple months before his wedding when I learned Penelope Hughes had a stalker.
Thank fuck he didn’t ask how I knew.
Good goddamn question. I’ve asked myself that since I sat outside her studio one day wondering if she was who she said she was. What the hell am I doing spying on the wealthy wife of a financier?
Jacobi thought I was doing him a favor, protecting his wife’s friend so his wife didn’t get upset and therefore get him into trouble with her. I was the one who told him about Penelope’s situation. She was an oblivious flame, and I was a lost moth who couldn’t mind his own business. She should be nothing more than a friend of a friend, but I made her my business. I thought— No, that was the problem. I didn’t think; I remembered. Penelope Hughes made me remember, and the memories that surfaced weren’t the good ones.
Penelope disappears inside her studio.
I have a natural distrust of beautiful women. It hasn’t helped that I haven’t had an adult relationship that wasn’t some form of quid pro quo. But a gorgeous dancer with a studio barely breaking even in a part of town that looks nothing like the Bel Air estate where she lives with the husband she never mentions? The only woman like her that I know has ten years left on her prison sentence.
